Design and Layout Suggestions

[Nick]

Yes, we can. It is as easy as enabling the block. Just have a look! It should be there by the time you read this (unless I have killed the system again)

[zourtney]

Nice! I might CSS in a background color, unless you like it naked, like that?

[Nick]

Feel free! it would be nice if it tied into the rest of the menu colors and the like.

[zourtney]

This may be heresy, but what do you think of hosting our images elsewhere? It'd save you a lot of bandwidth but we may lose a little bit of control.

A quick google search popped up a little blurb in favor of using external web hosting. I did a quick search for Flickr-Drupal modules, and it looks like there is something out there. So it might actually make our lives easier (for permalinking pictures).

Just a thought.

Oh, I forgot to mention the reason I thought of this in the first place: if we're on Flickr or something, we'll get noticed much easier.

[zourtney]

Ugh. My head hurts.

Also, after looking through Flickr's limitations, I don't like the sound of trying to use it. You can only create 3 or so photoalbums with a free account (and I don't see any compelling reason to pay $25/yr for a pro account). Only the last 200 photos show up in the "photostream." They encourage static linking, but if you can't view everything we've uploaded, what's the point?

So the local gallery still wins. And the desire to create our own grows a little.

[zourtney]

I made a few uglifications to the main site's theme. If you notice them, let me know if you think they help or make things worse.

On another note, I was trying to clean up some messy and duplicate content this evening (after my headache subsided to "tolerable"). I noticed that the breadcrumb line often made no sense. It seemed that all pages were at the top level -- only pages that were part of a book were showing up any useful information. I dug around for a few minutes and found some logical answers. This site suggested making a book for every section. I have implemented this structure for Motors and it seems to work well.

• The plus side: breadcrumb nav makes sense!
• The down side: books automatically add a nav footer. The "next" and "previous" links show up and will jump you to an unrelated page (ie Francine's Top Level Page has a previous page of Blazer Projects)

I matched the breadcrumb path to the custom URL path for everything under Motors (and Tech, I do believe). This seems like tedious information redundancy, but it the end result is good. There is only one problem...

The Rec, Opinion, and Review sections are set up differently. I do believe it is displaying a View. This makes it impossible make it into a Book. Perhaps we could change it so that the root page of every section is an "About" page with the view embedded in it? We could change the View URL to /section_name/search accordingly.

Just a thought. Opinions?

[Nick]

I set them all up like that to play with the different ways you can make a page. They are just lists of everything with a specific taxonomy term attached. I think the category type might do the bookish thing you are looking for to get the bread crumbs working nice without the bottom nav (having the bottom nave makes no sense except for multiple-page articles.) sopkalh I am tired and thats all for now.

[Nick]

Ok I lied. I have more.

I like. Though I think the menu bar still needs a little refinement, but it looks cool. Also the bottom text on the poll is a little hard to read on my monitor. Don't know how it is on newer ones. But nice!

[zourtney]

Yeah, I can read the black text on the blue (for the poll footer), but the links make my eyes go a little buggy. I was wondering if it did the same for you -- apparently so.

I had to change the PHP a little, but now link footer of the poll is in the CSS as .poll.links (I think). It's in the theme's CSS file.

Any luck finding your camera?

[zourtney]

Oh yeah, and as far as the header thing, I was trying to do something similar to the forum. It ended up being not very similar, but I like the look of a menubar that spans the screen width. It could certainly use refinement. That image is called 'tabs-back.png' under the theme's image directory, if you want to mess with it.

Also, the breadcrumb background image is called 'breadcrumb-back.png' in the same directory. I can give you the PSDs when I get home, if you want. They're easy to recreate though (and you might do a better job)

Refine away 

[Nick]

Its raining so its either that or start cleaning again. Though I guess I should do a little of both. I'll see what I come up with and perhaps put some examples here. Then we can decide if they are of live-able quality.

[zourtney]

So, I was wondering why we still have so many themes installed on the server. There is a 'randomland' theme, but that is not used. There are a bunch of others too. Do we need those? We're kind of set in our style, and it's all based around the 'zen' theme.

[Nick]

The zen theme is kinda like a blank template for making a theme off of. If I had done it correctly there would be a sub theme to the zen theme called randomlands-theme or something. But I got distracted before I got that far, though it is not to late to finish that. You can delete the others if you want. Some of that mess is the result of the test install becoming the live install. Just don't delete the zen directory

[zourtney]

Ok, I might do that some time soon. I just wanted to make sure they weren't being used anymore.

I was kind of toying with the idea of making a mobile theme where the sidebars were removed. It seemed like a fairly simple thing to do when I was looking into it a week or so ago. Just a thought...

If we did that, we'd probably need to do some sort of weird subdomaining stuff which looked a little more complicated, but not impossible. Then we could have like http://m.randomland.net/motors/francine, or something.

Again, just a thought. It probably wouldn't ever benefit anyone but myself unless we get a traffic explosion...which sounds cool on multiple fronts, but is highly unlikely.

[Nick]

Sounds like an decent idea. Those who have full browsers on their phone might not care either way, but at least making the sidebars smaller (or just removing the right one) would probably help the mobile masses access things. I don't know if removing the BOTH sidebars would be good, how would anyone get to the admin section or user section? Unless we add that as the secondary navigation row (under the main menu bar thing) so yeah